Israel cannot rely on Americans or Europeans as allies or partners when it confronts threats from its Jew-obsessed neighbors.

Hatred of Jews is the central animating feature of the political and strategic
reality of the Middle East. It is hatred of Jews that dictates the legal
regimes, foreign policies, military aspirations, cultural mores, educational
themes and even public health policies of our neighbors from Ramallah to
Tehran.

Despite the centrality of Jew-hatred in all aspects of public
life in the Arab and Muslim world, our neighbors’ unrelenting and irrational
abhorrence for Israel and the Jewish people remains a dirty secret that you
aren’t supposed to mention in polite company. From Washington to Brussels, talk
of the policy implications of Arab and Muslim Jew-hatred is
prohibited.

Omar Abu-Sneina, a convicted terrorist murderer, is one of
the thousand Palestinian terrorists that Israel released from prison in order to
secure the release of Israeli hostage IDF Sgt.- Maj. Gilad Schalit. Originally
from Hebron, Abu-Sneina was released to Hamas-controlled Gaza.

This week
the IDF announced that since his release Abu-Sneina has returned to the terror
business. The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) intercepted a computer memory
card he sent his family in Hebron with instructions for how his fellow
terrorists should go about kidnapping and holding IDF soldiers hostage. The
instructions demonstrate how for Abu-Sneina, Israelis don’t even deserve to be
treated like animals.

Among other things, he discussed how to hide a
hostage. As he put it, “Avoid hiding [the captive soldier] in desolate places,
tunnels or forests, unless the aforementioned [captive] is a corpse or a severed
head. If the aforementioned is a live human, that must be visited at least once
a week and provided with food and drink, it is best to hide him in a house, an
agricultural farm, a workplace, etc.”

Abu-Sneina’s coldblooded cruelty
and rejection of the inherent value of the lives of Israelis is not simply a
function of the fact that he is a terrorist. It is a reflection of the values of
Palestinian society. Those values are continuously expressed and reinforced by
Fatah- and Hamas-controlled media outlets, cultural and educational institutions
and religious authorities. The ubiquitousness of Jew-hatred in the daily lives
of Palestinians is so overwhelming it is difficult to imagine any facet of
Palestinian life that isn’t inundated by it.

Take grammar lessons.
According to a translation provided by Palestinian Media Watch, the Palestinian
Authority’s Arabic language matriculation examinations for high school students
include questions such as “Punctuate the underlined phrase: Do not view the
occupier as human.” And “Punctuate the underlined phrase: We shall die in order
that our land may live.”

THIS WEEK, a Palestinian court sentenced
Muhammad Abu Shahala to death for selling a home in Hebron near the Cave of the
Patriarchs to Jews. Shahala was arrested shortly after several Jewish families
moved into the house last month. He was reportedly tortured and quickly tried
and sentenced to die by a PA court.

The PA was established in May 1994.
The first law it adopted defined selling land to Jews as a capital offense.
Shortly thereafter scores of Arab land sellers began turning up dead in
Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in both judicial and extrajudicial
killings.

Leaders of the Jewish community of Hebron wrote a letter to
international leaders this week asking them to intervene with PA Chairman
Mahmoud Abbas and demand that he cancel Shahala’s sentence. They addressed the
letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy, the
director-general of the International Red Cross, Yves Daccord, as well as Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. In it they wrote, “It is
appalling to think that property sales should be defined as a ‘capital crime’
punishable by death.

“The very fact that such a ‘law’ exists within the
framework of the PA legal system points to a barbaric and perverse type of
justice, reminiscent of practices implemented during the dark ages.”

They
went on to make the reasonable comparison between the PA’s law prohibiting land
sales to Jews to Nazi Germany’s Nuremburg laws that constrained and finally
outlawed trade between Jews and Germans. The letter concluded with the question,
“Is the Palestinian Authority a reincarnation of the Third Reich?”

The
Palestinians of course are far from unique in their obsession with hating Jews.
Their hemorrhage of hatred, their obsessive need to reject any move towards
peaceful coexistence with Israel, or what the renowned late Palestinian poet
Yousuf Al Khatib referred to picturesquely as “the Jewish filth of Europe,” is
matched in every Arab land. And of course, it is the primary obsession of the
Iranian regime.

The parallels between Nazi laws and the laws of the PA
and the Arab states that outlaw all cooperation with Israel and make such
cooperation a capital offense are obvious and straightforward. Yet
generally speaking, anyone who points out this fact is automatically dismissed
as an alarmist or an extremist. Given the PA’s relative military weakness when
compared with Israel and the Arab world’s current lack of interest in waging
active war against Israel, noting their inarguable ideological affinity with the
Nazis is considered socially and even intellectually unacceptable. The fact that
they lack the ability to implement their ideology renders it improper to mention
it.

The social prohibition on drawing parallels between the threats
facing Israel today and those that faced the Jewish people 70 years ago is not
limited to the discourse on the Arab world’s conflict with Israel. It also
extends to polite society’s discourse on Iran’s nuclear program, which the
Iranian regime has repeatedly made clear is aimed at destroying
Israel.

In his address to the nation at the annual Holocaust Remembrance
Day ceremony at Yad Vashem on Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu took aim at that taboo when he attacked those who accuse him of
belittling the Holocaust by comparing the annihilation of European Jewry to the
threat posed by Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Netanyahu said, “I know
there are also those who believe that the unique evil of the Holocaust should
never be invoked in discussing other threats facing the Jewish people. To do so,
they argue, is to belittle the Holocaust and to offend its victims.

“I
totally disagree. On the contrary. To cower from speaking the uncomfortable
truth – that today like then, there are those who want to destroy millions of
Jewish people – that is to belittle the Holocaust, that is to offend its victims
and that is to ignore the lessons.

“Not only does the prime minister of
Israel have the right, when speaking of these existential dangers, to invoke the
memory of a third of our nation which was annihilated. It is his
duty.”

NETANYAHU IS right, of course. Unfortunately for Israel, raising
the Holocaust in the context of a discussion about contemporary threats to the
Jewish people is the rhetorical equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb. Just as
no one is allowed to use a nuclear bomb, no one is allowed to mention the
Holocaust. And that means that there is ultimately no way to speak about the
violent hatred that animates our enemies in every aspect of their policy
making. From the seemingly anodyne issue of property sales to the
existential issue of nuclear weapons programs, the Jew-hatred that lies at the
foundation of their actions is out of bounds for discussion.

Actually,
the situation is both better and worse than that. Netanyahu’s rhetorical
boldness in drawing the parallel between Iran and the Nazis is arguably the only
reason that the EU and the Obama administration have taken any actions against
Iran. No, as their feckless negotiations with the mullahs, their foot-dragging
in implementing economic sanctions, and their outspoken opposition to military
action against Iran make clear, they do not really mind the prospect of Iran
acquiring the ability to wipe out the Jewish state. The only reason they have
adopted sanctions at all is because Netanyahu’s Holocaust rhetoric made them
fear that Israel would attack Iran’s nuclear installations if they
didn’t.

On the other hand, when it comes to their direct dealings with
Jew-haters, Westerners not only fail to confront them about their
prejudice. They enable it. For instance, at a townhall meeting during her
visit to Tunisia last month, Hillary Clinton was asked how US leaders can be
trusted when during elections, “most of the candidates from both sides run
towards the Zionist lobbies to get their support.”

Rather than reject the
anti-Jewish premise of the question – that Jews exert inordinate control over US
politics or that there is something wrong with candidates expressing support for
Israel – Clinton treated the question as legitimate.

She said, “A lot of
things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of
attention.”

Clinton even congratulated her anti-Jewish questioner,
saying, “I think it’s a fair question because I... sometimes am a little
surprised that people around the world pay more attention to what is said in our
political campaigns than most Americans.”

Similarly, a report on the
behind the scenes goings on at last weekend’s nuclear negotiations with Iran
published by Al-Monitor described the friendly discussion that took place at a
dinner Friday night between EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iranian
chief negotiator Saeed Jalili. According to a European diplomat, the
conversation was aimed at breaking the ice. And it included a discussion
of “political party funding in the US.”

It is hard to imagine that such a
discussion involved anything other than a group tongue-clucking session directed
against the inordinate impact of “Jewish money” on US electoral
politics. That is, it is all but impossible to imagine that the
discussion involved anything other than Ashton attempting to build a rapport
with her Iranian counterpart based on shared hatred or contempt for
Jews.

The fact that the West refuses to consider the policy implications
of the most powerful force in Arab and Iranian policy-making and political life
does not mean that Israeli policy-makers should necessarily expand their
discussion of the topic – although it would probably not hurt for them to do so.
What it means is that the general policy debate in the West about the nature of
Middle Eastern politics is completely divorced from reality.

Because the
Americans and the Europeans refuse to acknowledge the elephant of Jew-hatred in
the middle of the room, they cannot be trusted to make reasoned or rational
policy decisions. And since they cannot be trusted to act rationally, Israel
cannot rely on the Americans or the Europeans as allies or partners when it
confronts threats from its Jew-obsessed
neighbors.